We Won't Need Legs to Stand
by awesomesausome
Summary: If she's being honest, her hands are not clean. They've never been clean.


Disclaimer: The title is from a Sufjan Stevens song. The characters don't belong to me. I think that about covers it.

* * *

If she's being honest, her hands are not clean. They've never been clean.

She never thought about the moral implications of what she was doing, but if she had, she would have to acknowledge that the ethics of her science were dubious at best.

Eric Byer might be the villain in her story, but he's not the only villain. There's no black and white. No good versus bad. There's only varying shades of gray, and her hands stained with the same blood that is on Eric Byer's hands.

She's always been bad with people. Science made sense. Her life was falling apart around her. Literally. The house she had bought with Peter was a dump. It was a money pit that had taken her relationship and most of her savings. It was a romantic and stupid decision. She felt relieved when Aaron burned it to the ground. It was cathartic, almost, or would have been cathartic if it hadn't been for the four bodies inside, and the knowledge that without Aaron's last minute intervention, her body would be burning along with it.

But inside the lab? Inside the lab she felt the most at home. It didn't matter that Peter had left her finally, after months of screaming matches out in their lonely woods. There were months of Peter accusing her of loving her work more than she loved him, and her private, painful acknowledgment that it was true. Those problems, those issues, they didn't exist inside the lab, and Marta found herself spending more and more time there.

She actually appreciated the way that the program encouraged detachment from the assets. Even the way that they referred to them as assets, and not agents, and especially not by their real names. They weren't real people with real feelings and real lives, and she didn't think about what they did or did not do when they left her lab. It made it easier for her to poke and prod and manipulate their genetic make-up without having to think about the consequences of actions. _Her_ actions. Not Eric Byer's. Not Aaron's. Hers.

* * *

Marta knew that she compartmentalized her work. Kept it separate. And she never considered that there might be a time when she would have to own up to her part in it all.

It takes no time at all for her and Aaron to move into a physical relationship. Once their bodies heal and they're lost out at sea with a captain who speaks very little English and is incredibly wary of his two stow-aways, they begin to spend more time in the same bed than in different beds.

They spend the nights curled up with each other. She tells him about Peter and about her job. He tells her about his life before Outcome. His life as Kenneth Kitsom, and then his life as an agent. She makes herself ask questions, and he seems as uncomfortable about answering them as she is about asking. But she needs to know. She needs to know how filthy her hands are. How deep in she is. She needs to know so that she can begin to figure out how to absolve for her sins.

"Do you think I deserved to die in that lab? Or in that house?" Her voice is small, and it's something she has wondered about.

"No," Aaron's voice is firm, and his grip tightens around her body.

"I'm not innocent," she states, and she knows it to be true.

"You were doing what your country asked you to do," he answers. "No one deserved to die like that, not your co-workers, and not you. They don't have the right to condemn you to death for doing something that they asked you to do. They don't have the right to decide if and when we are expendable."

He tells her about the bad intel. The mission gone wrong. He tells her about Eric Byer and his sin-eaters speech. He tells her that she's made some morally questionable decisions but they don't come close to the sins that Byer has to answer for.

He makes love to her and it feels an awful lot like an absolution.

* * *

When they get off the boat, Marta is afraid Aaron might finally realize that she's a hindrance. He doesn't need her anymore, not really, but the idea of being without him is unthinkable. Somehow, after only a few weeks, she feels closer to him than she ever did with Peter. She feels like he knows her inside and out.

But when they climb off the boat onto solid land, he offers his hand out to her and gives her a slight smile. They get lost in the sea of people at the dock, and she trusts him. Implicitly.

She would follow him anywhere.

He gives her hand a squeeze. Her dirty, bloody hands. But as he tangles his fingers with hers and tugs her deeper into some port in some city in some country that she couldn't point out on a map, she thinks maybe it doesn't matter. Maybe her sins burned down in that ramshackle house. Maybe as she moves forward, she's not Dr. Shearing anymore, she's just Marta, and maybe she can work with that.


End file.
